Category Archives: Environmentalism & Animal Rights

UPDATE II: Big-Game Plunderer (& Progressive) Theodore Roosevelt

Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Ethics, History, Republicans, The State

The reverence for authority and status, especially presidential, obscures the ability to distill the actions of The Revered One to their ethical essence. Last night, Fox News’ Sean Hannity’s moral assessment of the “sport” of hunting Africa’s big game amounted to: The [Progressive] Theodore Roosevelt (TR) did it. Do you condemn him, too?

You bet we do (and not only for plundering Africa’s wild life with cruel abandon).

Back from safari in Africa, the TR procession “through New York in June 1910,” featured “a fourteen-carriage parade from Battery to 59th Street, with luggage containing horns, heads, and skins from 13,000 specimens, ranging from elephant and rhinos to the rare dikdik, and antelope smaller than a jack-rabbit.”

(A History of The American People by Paul Johnson, p. 623.)

More about Teddy’s other proclivities.
https://www.ilanamercer.com/2011/12/who-s-it-to-be-teddy-no-1-or-teddy-no-2/

UPDATE I: To be clear, I am here making a moral argument, not a legal one. It’s true that big- game hunting is often a boon to the parks in these poor, backward countries. It’s true, too, that Zimbabwe has zero animal-conservation ethos; those are all western; as is it true that their leader is chief poacher of man and animal alike—and it’s still true that big-game hunters who derive pleasure from the rigged canned killing of an animal are MOTHER F-CKERS.
https://www.ilanamercer.com/2013/11/just-girl-gun-not-gratuitous-killer/ (Correct link)

UPDATE II: Via Myron Pauli:

Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to Sir Edward Grey, 22 January 1915

Ugly American Abroad

Africa, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Ethics

“Hunting for sport is a barbaric practice suited for Esau, Nimrod and their ilk, and not for the merciful people of Israel.”—Node Beyehuda, an authority in Jewish law (1713–1793).

Amen.

Somehow one can understand the motives of the local Zimbabwean poachers in murdering Cecil The Lion: greed, need, abject poverty. Other than the thrill of the kill, American dentist Walter Palmer, on the other hand, had no justification for tricking, cornering and then killing Cecil The Magnificent. Those are the acts of a blood-thirsty coward, the definition of a canned lion hunt.

Broadcaster Dana Loesch is right to bring up motherf-cker Mugabe’s birthday party menu unmentioned by liberals.(Leave the Planned Parenthood fetuses out of this; one can and should be outraged by both the murder of Cecil and the barter in baby parts. There is no contradiction.) As I wrote at the time:

Question: What do you call a “person” who butchers and barbeques baby elephant?
Answer: A motherf-cker.

Lowbrow Robert Mugabe, as Foreign Policy has reported, “celebrated his 91st birthday followed by a lavish party with an exotic menu, reportedly including barbequed baby elephant. The brazen celebration was yet another reminder of the stark contrast between the increasingly venal lifestyles of the country’s politically-connected nouveau riche and regular Zimbabweans, who are now poorer than they were when Mugabe came to power nearly 35 years ago.”

This too: “Zoo poisons lion cubs to cut costs”

Pope In An Intellectual Wilderness

Capitalism, Christianity, Communism, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Intellectualism, The West

I once read a papal encyclical: John Paul’s. With his 1998 encyclical, Pope John Paul sounded a lone voice for both “Faith and Reason” in the postmodern religious wilderness. Who else spoke with unhectoring clarity about the errors of relativism in modern thought? Certainly not Pope Francis. He’s too dumb to consider such abstractions.

That Jorge Bergoglio is shaping up to be a bit of a bumpkin is no surprise. He hails from the Latin American strain of Catholicism. And he, Pope Francis, is threatening to undo what Pope John labored to achieve: “steer liberation theology away from the influence of Marxist social analysis.”

In the 2015 encyclical, the Holy See saddles the richest nations with the blame for the despoliation of the earth, when the truth is that the developed world’s advanced technology has helped clean-up the atmosphere, the oceans and the waterways. It is the developing nations—China, India—that despoil the earth and its creatures most. The earth looks like “an immense pile of filth” not in Canada, Germany, or the US (except for where illegal immigrants tread: see “Illegal Immigration’s Negative Impact on the Environment”).

The love for the earth, its creatures and our pets (parrots, dogs, cats) is a distinctly Western sensibility.

The Catholic Crisis Magazine can’t help but take a swipe at the anti-intellectualism of this pope’s “close advisors”:

… the hortatory Cardinal Maradiaga of Honduras said [this] with ill-tempered diction: “The ideology surrounding environmental issues is too tied to a capitalism that doesn’t want to stop ruining the environment because they don’t want to give up their profits.” From the empirical side, to prevent the disdain of more informed scientists generations from now, papal teaching must be safeguarded from attempts to exploit it as an endorsement of one hypothesis over another concerning anthropogenic causes of climate change. It is not incumbent upon a Catholic to believe, like Rex Mottram in Brideshead Revisited, that a pope can perfectly predict the weather. …

Intellectually, Pope Francis is no match for his predecessors. And that’s putting it kindly.

Recommended reading:

“On The Line: The Impact of Immigration Policy on Wild Life and on the Arizona Borderlands”

“Environmentalism in the Light of Menger and Mises” By George Reisman (The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics)

American Pharoah Flogged To Victory

Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Ethics, Sport

They’re both superb specimen. The one, however, is whipped into victory. American Pharoah, a beautiful and brave racehorse, won the Belmont Stakes on Saturday. American Pharoah’s jockey, Victor Espinoza, is a demonic dwarf who is known for breaking the horse’s skin.

I imagine this deformed tormentor will be celebrated as a big money maker, and the real workhorse will not get so much as a sugar lump.

The other exceptional specimen is, of course, Serena Williams. Serena won the French Open, also on Saturday, “and claimed a landmark 20th grand slam title and third in Paris.”

Serena is a human being, so she isn’t ridden to victory; or beaten into championship. Should American Pharoah suffer indignities because he is a horse? How about it?